In one of Jesus’s parables, a servant owes his king ten thousand talents. The king forgives him. The same servant then finds a fellow servant who owes him a hundred denarii, seizes him by the throat and has him thrown into prison (Matthew 18:23–35). The whole story turns on the difference between those two sums. A reader who does not know what a talent or a denarius was can follow the plot, but misses the shock.
That is the problem with every weight, measure and coin in the Bible. The units were ordinary to the first hearers and are strange to us. A translation can keep them, convert them, or explain them, and each choice gains something and loses something. This article walks through the main units, the ways translations have handled them, and what Open Word Bible does.
Silver by weight
Coins came late. For most of the Old Testament period, silver was not counted but weighed out on scales. When Abraham buys a field to bury Sarah, he “weighed” the silver to Ephron (Genesis 23:16). So the oldest money words in the Bible are really weights.
- The shekel was the basic weight, a little under half an ounce, roughly 11 or 12 grams. The word comes from the Hebrew verb “to weigh.”
- The gerah was a twentieth of a shekel (Exodus 30:13).
- The mina was a larger weight, usually reckoned at fifty or sixty shekels.
- The talent was the largest, the load a man could carry. Exodus 38:25–26 implies three thousand shekels to the talent, which on common estimates is somewhere around 75 pounds.
Weights varied from place to place and over time. There was a “shekel of the sanctuary” (Exodus 30:13) and a royal standard (2 Samuel 14:26). Any modern figure is an approximation.
Ephron’s price for the field was four hundred shekels. The record for Genesis 23:15 notes that this was a very high price; Jeremiah bought a field for seventeen (Jeremiah 32:9). Our Balanced level reads:
“Sir, hear me. Land worth about 10 pounds of silver, what is that between friends like you and me? Go and bury your dead.”
“About 10 pounds” of silver gives a reader something to picture. The original “400 shekels” is one tap away, as we will see.
Because honest weights were the basis of honest trade, the prophets return to them again and again. “You shall have just balances, a just ephah, and a just bath,” says Ezekiel 45:10 in the World English Bible. Amos condemns those who make the ephah small and the shekel large (Amos 8:5).
Coins of the New Testament
By the time of Jesus, Judea used coins from several systems at once.
- The denarius was a Roman silver coin. In the parable of the workers in the vineyard, the owner agrees to pay “a denarius for the day” (Matthew 20:2), so it is usually taken as a laborer’s daily wage. The word is δηναρίου (dēnarion).
- The drachma was the Greek silver coin of about the same value. The woman in Luke 15:8 has ten.
- The stater in Matthew 17:27 was worth four drachmas, enough to pay the temple tax for two men.
- The lepton was the smallest copper coin. Mark says the poor widow gave two of them, “which is a quadrans,” explaining a local coin by a Roman one (Mark 12:42). A quadrans was a sixty-fourth of a denarius, so the widow gave about a sixty-fourth of a day’s pay.
- The mina and the talent were still sums of account rather than coins. In the Greek system a mina was a hundred drachmas, and a talent sixty minas, about six thousand denarii.
So the servant in Matthew 18 owed sixty million days’ wages. His fellow servant owed him a hundred. The record for Matthew 18:24 adds that ten thousand was the largest number in common Greek use. The sum is meant to be beyond counting.
Lengths and volumes
The cubit was the length of a forearm, from the elbow to the tip of the middle finger, about 18 inches or 45 centimeters. Ezekiel’s temple was measured in a longer cubit, “a cubit and a handbreadth” (Ezekiel 40:5). In the New Testament, longer distances are given in Greek stadia, each about 600 feet, and in Roman miles, a thousand paces, a little shorter than a modern mile.
For dry goods such as grain, the standard Old Testament measure was the ephah, perhaps half a bushel. The omer was a tenth of an ephah, and the homer, perhaps “a donkey load,” was ten. Liquids were measured by the bath, which Ezekiel 45:11 sets equal to the ephah, and the smaller hin. The jars at Cana held two or three of a Greek liquid measure, the μετρητὰς (metrētēs), about 39 liters each.
Scholars’ estimates for these volumes differ more than for lengths. Our own records are frank about it. The note for Ezekiel 45:11 says that modern estimates “differ widely,” that our published books give an ephah as about 20 quarts, and that in Ezekiel, where the text makes the ephah and the bath equal, both are given as about 6 gallons. A footnote tells the reader so.
Four ways to handle a unit
Translations have taken four broad approaches, and most mix them.
Keep the unit. “Three hundred cubits” is what the Hebrew says, and it keeps the text’s own world. The reader may not know how long a cubit is, but nothing has been changed. The cost is that the number says nothing to most readers.
Swap in a familiar unit. Older English Bibles often borrowed units from their own day. The King James Version paid the vineyard workers “a penny a day,” gave the servants in Luke 19 “ten pounds,” filled the jars at Cana with “two or three firkins apiece,” and had the widow give “two mites, which make a farthing.” In 1611 a penny was a fair day’s pay. Today it is nothing, and the parable now seems to be about a stingy employer. Swapped units age badly.
Convert to modern measures. “450 feet long” tells a reader at once how large the ark was. But conversion has costs. It can suggest more precision than anyone has, especially for volumes. Money converted into dollars or pounds goes out of date with inflation. And some numbers in the Bible matter as numbers. The wall of the new Jerusalem is 144 cubits, twelve times twelve (Revelation 21:17). “About 216 feet” is accurate, but the twelves have disappeared.
Explain the value. Instead of a currency, say what the money could buy or how long it took to earn: “a day’s wage,” “four months’ pay.” This does not go out of date, because wages are a human measure. It is the approach most modern meaning-based translations take with money. Its cost is that it is less exact, and it is an interpretation of value, not a translation of a word.
No single approach is right everywhere. In Ezekiel 45:10, where the measures themselves are the subject, our Literal and Balanced levels keep “an honest ephah and an honest bath” with no modern figures. In a parable, where the point is how much or how little, a reader needs the value.
What Open Word Bible does
Open Word Bible keeps the meaning in one place and lets the wording vary, so it does not have to pick only one of these approaches.
The meaning decision for each unit says what it was and roughly what it was worth. For Matthew 20:2, the decision is that a denarius was “a fair, ordinary day’s wage.” For Genesis 6:15, it is that a cubit was “about 18 inches (45 centimeters).” These hold for every level and every language.
The Literal level always keeps the ancient unit. A reader studying the text sees talents, cubits and ephahs, as the original has them.
The Balanced and Readable levels give a modern equivalent by default, and the Measures setting lets a reader switch back to the original unit. In the reader, this appears only on pages that have measurements. Like every reader setting, it changes wording, never meaning: three hundred cubits and 450 feet are the same length (see Settings change wording, never meaning). The ark’s dimensions at Balanced read:
This is how you are to make it: the ark is to be 450 feet long, 75 feet wide and 45 feet high.
With Measures set to Original, the same sentence gives 300, fifty and thirty cubits.
For money, the modern equivalent is usually a value in wages, not a currency. Matthew 18:28 gives the fellow servant’s debt as “about a hundred days’ wages,” and Philip’s estimate in John 6:7 as “more than half a year’s wages.” For the first servant’s ten thousand talents, Balanced says “a sum no worker could earn in a hundred thousand years,” and Readable adds a sentence: “No one could ever pay back that much money.” A record for that added sentence explains that Readable is saying what the sum meant to the hearers.
English uses feet, gallons and miles. The drafts in other languages use metric units: the jars at Cana hold “20 to 30 gallons” in English and entre 80 y 120 litros in Spanish. That is a rendering decision for each language. The meaning decision, two or three measures of about 39 liters each, is shared.
Where the drafts make exceptions
The interesting cases are where the drafts depart from the usual pattern, and say why.
When a name is repeated. In Luke’s parable of the minas, the word “mina” comes back again and again as each servant reports. Converting it every time would make the dialogue hard to follow. So every level keeps “mina,” and Readable explains it once, in a sentence of its own:
Before he left, he called ten of his servants. He gave each of them one mina. A mina was an amount of money worth about a hundred days’ pay. He told them, ‘Use this money to do business until I come back.’
The rendering decision also notes why the older “pound” was dropped: it now suggests British money.
When the coin is not named. Judas was paid “thirty pieces of silver” (Matthew 26:15). Matthew does not say which coin, so Balanced and Readable say “thirty silver coins” and give no modern figure. A meaning decision, marked uncertain, says that if they were shekels the sum was about four months’ wages, and another notes the echo of Zechariah 11:12. Thirty shekels was also the price of a slave in Exodus 21:32.
When a tax has a name. The collectors in Matthew 17:24 ask about “the two drachmas.” Balanced and Readable call it “the temple tax,” because that is what it was: the half-shekel each Jewish man paid every year for the temple. A footnote explains, and the Measures setting gives “two-drachma tax.”
When a word looks familiar. Mary’s perfume in John 12:3 was a “pound,” but a Roman pound, about 11.5 ounces. A modern reader would take “a pound” as sixteen ounces, so Balanced and Readable say “about 12 ounces” by default.
When small is the point. The widow’s two lepta become, at Balanced, “two little copper coins, worth a few minutes’ wages,” and at Readable “two tiny copper coins that were worth almost nothing.”
Large numbers and symbolic numbers
Revelation raises a different question. The new Jerusalem measures 12,000 stadia on each side, as long as it is wide and high, and its wall 144 cubits. Our Balanced and Readable levels give “about 1,400 miles” and “about 216 feet” by default. But the meaning decisions for these verses, both marked uncertain, add what a conversion cannot show: twelve thousand is twelve times a thousand, the number of God’s people in Revelation 7, and the city’s cube shape recalls the most holy place of Solomon’s temple (1 Kings 6:20). A reader who wants to see the twelves can switch to the original units, or read Literal, or open the record. None of these routes hides the other.
Why it matters
In many passages the amount is the message. The widow gave almost nothing, and Jesus said she gave more than all the rest. The forgiven servant’s debt was unpayable, and his fellow servant’s was not. A reader who loses the sense of scale loses the point.
Open Word Bible’s approach tries to give both. The ancient unit is always there, at the Literal level and behind the Measures setting. The modern sense is always there, at the other levels and in the meaning decision. The drafts are AI-assisted and none has yet been reviewed, and figures like these are exactly what reviewers should test. Where scholars’ estimates differ, the records say so.
For more on how the levels and settings fit together, see Literal, Balanced, Readable: three levels, one meaning. For the related question of how ancient people counted time, see Telling time in the Bible.
Open Matthew 18, Genesis 6 or John 2 and switch the Measures setting to see both wordings.